A Mysterious Stranger Protests the Trustee Election

(Very conveniently for Michael Mulgrew and his little Unity ducklings.)

It’s kind of remarkable, as I wrote yesterday, that our pension trustee election is at the last minute, with little to no prep time. It’s becoming very clear, as you will see from the letter below, that this was completely due to a formal protest of Ben Morgenroth’s candidacy.

Did you sign his petition? As a retiree, I did not, could not. However, I circulated it at Francis Lewis High School, where I work F-status. I collected a few hundred signatures. Some guy named Jeffrey Novzen, a teacher I’ve never met or heard of, contended every single signer in our building was a fraud, in one way or another. That is to say, he challenged every single friend of mine who had the temerity to encourage our having a choice of trustee. Though I handed a few forms to friends, I witnessed most of these signatures.

In any case, this protest meant the DOE had to investigate all his claims, fourteen of them, and determine their validity. For the most part, all his claims were unfounded. I’d argue, from firsthand knowledge, that they were largely nonsensical. As you can see from the decision letter, the chancellor’s designee seemed to agree.

So here’s the question that keeps popping up in my mind. Why would Some Guy decide that ALL Ben’s signatures were invalid, and list fourteen specific objections that read very much like they’re written by a lawyer? What possible motivation would Some Guy who never met me have for deciding that I falsified hundreds of signatures, rather than simply asking people to sign?

If I had a suspicious mind, I’d think that someone from Unity Caucus put the guy up to it. After all, we have abundant evidence that Unity does not believe in democracy.

Just for starters, there was no vote on Mulgrew’s health care giveaway in 2014. There was no vote on his health care giveaway in 2018. There was no vote on dumping Medicare-eligible retirees into a demonstrably inferior “Advantage” plan. And, there was no vote on replacing Emblem/ GHI with something 10% cheaper for Eric Adams (soon coming to a rank and file near you).

We know that when the OT/PT chapter voted down their proposed contract, Mulgrew could not be bothered doing his actual job—going back and getting them something better they’d accept. I remember him saying the city didn’t want to do that. Here’s an obvious fact—the city NEVER wants to improve anyone’s contract. It’s Mulgrew’s job to negotiate something better. THAT is what the OT/PT chapter asked him to do, and that is what we PAY him to do.

Mulgrew said screw you, and made them vote on the very same thing. This was a winner for him, because not only did he not have to do his job, but the opposition chapter leader walked out in disgust. After all, he never let her do her job anyway. He had his little ducklings edit anything she wished to send to members. That was blatantly undemocratic. The members chose her, not Rick Mantel, the guy who, I’m told, censored her outgoing email.

So it’s not really shocking to me that Mulgrew would not wish to have a trustee election. After all, the thing about elections is you can lose. Here’s the thing, though—Mulgrew has clearly demonstrated, over the last decade, that his prime concern is making money for the city. If that comes at our expense, he’s fine with it. He’s willing to gamble with things as fundamental as our health.

So honestly, how can we trust Mulgrew, or any of his ducklings, to watch our investments for us? What if there were some way he could find to give money to the city at our expense? That’s not unprecedented. Shortly after the awful 2005 contract, Unity bosses managed to reduce our fixed TDA interest from 8.25 to 7%. EVERY OTHER UNION still gets 8.25.

What are they capable of?

Are they capable of getting their lawyers to write a bunch of nuisance complaints, with little or no merit, and then getting Some Guy to file them, so their fingerprints cannot be found? Well, I know firsthand that they used our dues money to have their lawyers come after me for parodying Mulgrew, so it’s pretty clear to me their guiding philosophy is something along the line of, “Ethics, shmethics.”

So perhaps Some Guy decided, with no evidence whatsoever, that Ben Morgenroth’s petitions were completely fraudulent. Perhaps Some Guy decided to lay out fourteen largely preposterous arguments as to why that was. Perhaps it’s a simple coincidence and UFT Unity has nothing whatsoever to do with this complaint, a complaint that led to the preclusion of any debate within buildings about the candidates.

Perhaps it’s just coincidence that the DOE has now decided to use electronic voting. Now I support electronic voting, and I think we should use it in union elections. Perhaps then we’d no longer have the vast majority of UFT members sitting them out. However, the current city rules do not allow for electronic voting.

UFT Unity could protest this, and either delay or prevent the vote that’s supposed to take place on Wednesday. In fact, when they lose the vote, they could ask for a revote. That’s what they did when Michael Shulman from New Action was elected VP for high schools. Of course, they lost the revote by a wider margin. (Then they changed the rules so high school teachers could no longer select their own VP anymore.)

Anyway, take a peek at the objections below. What do you think? Did Some Guy just make them? Or were Mulgrew, Unity, and perhaps even lawyers paid with our dues, behind all this?

It’s a great mystery.